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Now Watching the American Demise on Mute: An Addendum

The following started as a “thank you” response to lineholder for his comment under last week’s dairy (1) …a response that quickly grew out of control into another full ramble that I then abandoned out of exhaustion – and due to school night kid duties – late Sunday evening. After much trimming and some adding, here’s a short follow-on:

“…from bureaucracy to shining bureaucracy.” (2)

My greater struggle is that there is some threshold beyond which party affiliation is no longer the proper distinction between me and the names and faces of the blue state agenda. Party differences imply a debate about how our society will operate within the framework of this specific constitutional republic. Obama, Holder, Sebelius, Clinton…the list could go on…this crowd has been out of bounds since they high-fived Carol Browner back into the administration after she gave a big middle finger to a federal judge upon exiting her final Clinton administration position. Ever since, they have been hell bent on steamrolling down this anti-liberty “fundamental transformation”. As always, Orwell seemed to know well our current “ruling class”…or as he would call them “the right left people“:

“It is the same pattern all the time; [private*] school, university, a few trips abroad, then [NY or DC]. Hunger, hardship, solitude, exile, war, prison, persecution, manual labour – hardly even words. … To people of that kind such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial, etc., etc., are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism**. … [Their] brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot” (2)

Or just don’t care.

Does that push it too far? OK, step back from “when the trigger is pulled” and substitute “when the plug is pulled”…and don’t blame a “fictional” death panel or Kathleen Sebelius because they will be somewhere else while you’re stuck trying to get through an impossible phone menu system to get an actual human…no doubt a useless bureaucrat that can only read from a prepared on-line script for $175K/year…attempting to save Mother from a completely preventable death.

So yes, I do taste the puke in the back of my throat at even seeing a photo of Kathleen Sebelius as tidbits emerge from her sanctimonious, dutiful implementation of that anti-liberty monstrosity that will now send us down a very dark path. And, despite the Chief Justice’s foolish position, Obamacare is the clearest example of a broader Progressive agenda – blue state agenda – that is beyond the bounds of the Founders framework.

<CLIP>(Removed long diatribe questioning the patriotism and purported Christianity of Sebelius and other members of this administration…particularly those who held the title “Senator” prior to their current Executive branch positions.)<CLIP>

Finally, there is the wide spectrum who awarded their vote to promises of (and the absolute certainty of) four more years of this disaster. Again, there is a threshold somewhere between “duped by the demagogue” and “true believer”…exactly where I do not know…beyond which the phrase “fellow American” is no longer appropriate. [Here in response to lineholder, see link (1)] I do wonder, however, after you (or we) do get our priorities straight, how do we deal with the fact that the opposition has priorities that are wrong, destructive to the country and my liberties, and ultimately evil in nature?

Not Falling for the Charade

Recent history has taught me a valuable lesson that applies to both budget compromise negotiations/deals and Senate confirmation of Executive nominees: The presentation of the particular event or series of events that we see is most certainly a political charade loosely coordinated between both parties to score some points with their respective bases while pursuing the modestly compromised ruling class agenda. OK, I’m sure that it’s not always that overt…and I’m sure there is some level of ruling class–to–ruling class tension…but the joke is always on us.

A wild conspiracy theory? Maybe. But after the last two debt ceiling debacles and the introduction of the word “sequester” into the national dialogue the Republican leadership is going to have to actually move the ball forward just once before I consider otherwise.

And don’t get me started on the possible promotion of Ambassador Rice (4). A few Senators on our side seem to oppose the move on the grounds that she is most likely an unethical, dishonest, liar that continues to give patently false responses to questions about her past. Pardon me but I don’t remember these character police worrying about such issues with the last nominee in late 2008 and early 2009. I have no doubt Ms. Rice is just as described above but I suspect the current flap is nothing more than performance art for us here in flyover country and will amount to nothing once a few cherished moderates take her side. (At least it won’t be Sen. Snowe sticking her finger in my eye this time around.) I say confirm her…it will be a seamless transition of incompetence…and, of course, the alternative could be orders of magnitude worse.

Patronizing Ruling Class Exposed (Revisited)

Speaking of Ms. Snowe, her of “When history calls, history calls” fame, this may be a good time to revisit early 2010 when those glorious moderates stepped up to pummel my liberties once agian. In this case the target is actually Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska and a very insulting paragraph from an email response to at least one of his constituents after assisting Obamacare through the Senate:

An important part of my decision was the fact that had this bill not been approved with my vote, the alternative for the Senate leadership was to use a procedure called “Budget Reconciliation.” This procedure would have enabled passage of a much less conservative bill, requiring only 51 votes in the Senate. I supported this bill for two reasons: first, because the reconciliation alternative would have included a government-run plan and would not have been as beneficial for Nebraskans; and second, because it will deliver relief from rising health care costs to Nebraska families, workers, rural communities, and employers. This bill takes a market-based approach, offering tax credits for middle-class Americans to help make insurance more affordable; and it improves the delivery of health care for all of us while reducing the deficit. (5) [empasis added]

To which I responded here on Redstate:

So it appears that the senator agreed to join the invaders as they strolled through our front door to poke us in the eye and steal some of our belongings in order to keep his party leadership from breaking in through the back door to punch us in the gut and steal all of our belongings. Somehow, in the twisted world of Modern Liberalism that is 2009 2010 America, I guess that is supposed to make him some kind of hero as opposed to an accomplice. Mr. Nelson really hopes that you are smart enough to appreciate the nuance of his position…and pull his polling numbers out of the crapper. I’m not buying it.

And to top it off, his last statement indicates that he seems to expect that we don’t understand that he knows full well that the inputs to the CBO scoring have been manipulated to such a great extent that the resulting analysis is all but meaningless to intelligent people. (5)

Intelligent people? That now sounds rather funny as we proceed toward the ridiculous sounding fate known as “Obama’s second term”

(3) Selective quoting from Inside the Whale, Orwell, 1940. * Actual word was public but in today’s meaning I believe private is correct. ** Orwell probably used “liberalism” to mean something different than today but the word fits here as is.